You need a data back up plan

Data is important, right?

We talk about securing your data, making sure your data is protected and away from prying eyes. But what about data backup?

It’s hard to ignore the impact of technology on businesses in the 21st century. We’re now more reliant than ever on depending on these ‘mission critical’ services and infrastructure.

In a previous article, we spoke about why you should probably colocate your server equipment from an uptime perspective, but how would your business fare if you lost all the data related to your work or your customers? More importantly, how would your business rise from the ashes if it didn’t even have a backup for this?

Many large companies out there have back up solutions already in plan. But even the most tech savvy and reputable companies are not immune to the woes of backup failures, as we have seen recently with GitLab and their recent backup blunder.

But for the smaller enterprises or individuals, the issue of backup should not be taken lightly. If you run any kind of operation digitally and rely on this data, you should always keep a copy of your latest work or records. And we don’t mean locally on your computer, or ensuring the autosave function is set up correctly.

As much as hardware reliability has improved throughout the years, hard drives, USB sticks and SD cards are still susceptible to failure. Once they do, the costs of professional data recovery could be very costly.

Aside from the reliability argument, people still fail to take into account the threat of theft or loss via misplacement. This is especially true when using external medium as the back up device.

Whilst having localised back up is better than having nothing at all, it’s difficult to argue with the benefits of having a professional backup solution or cloud backup solutions.

Security

The first thing you may be concerned about using these services is the idea of your data sitting at an external location that you do not own. Companies that provide data backup solutions take security very seriously. You can rest assured that not only is access to the data secure from unauthorised bodies on the digital front, it is also physically located in a highly secure location that is purpose-built to keep everything safe.

Cost

The second concern is that it’ll just be another cost added to the running of the business. The question you should really be asking yourself is, could you really afford not to have a decent backup solution? In fact, you may find that using professional backup solutions would actually be far more cost effective than the traditional method of buying your own equipment to do it yourself locally.

Efficiency

It’s not uncommon to hear from businesses that their ‘in-house’ backup plan involves manually backing up data on a regular basis using traditional methods. This takes away time from other tasks and also places a level of responsibility on an individual to remind themselves to get this done.

With a professional backup solution, this is scheduled automatically on a set frequency basis. This gives you a hands-free process of backing up your data.

Reliability

As we already mentioned, even with the improvements in hardware reliability, at the end of the day, hard drives can still fail. When you choose to use backup services, you are taking advantage of a system and infrastructure built specifically to take into account of multiple points of failure. There is effectively a backup of your backups. This makes for a much more resilient solution than traditional local backup methods.

As we become more reliant than ever on digital data, it only makes sense that we seek to protect it in every single way. However, just like phone insurance, it’s very easy to dismiss the need for such things until the worst really happens. At that point, it may be far too late to do anything about the valuable information that you may have lost.

By now, we hope you have made plans for a robust data backup plan. There is something to be said about learning from mistakes, and not letting history repeat itself, but somethings are not worth waiting to find out.